The Taxpayers' Alliance, an estimable body which seeks out waste and tries to prevent it, is vexed by Whitehall's taxi bill. It's £8 million a year, apparently. Mathew Elliot, the alliance's chief executive, calls this "excessive".

Four out of five people are satisfied with their local area as a place to live, a new survey published today by the Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG) has found. But issues about how the survey was designed and carried out, together with an embarrassingly low response rate to some questions, suggest we shouldn’t attach too much importance to the findings.